Patrons, Playwrights and More: Five Notable Arts Philanthropies Founded by People of Color
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American Ballet Theatre dancer Misty Copeland established her foundation in 2022. Photo: lev radin/shutterstock
Stereotypes of the typical arts patron aside, funders backing the arts come in all shapes and sizes. IP’s white papers on music, theater and the visual arts provide a snapshot of givers in each field — affluent donors, large private foundations, and a galaxy of smaller funders like community foundations, mid-level patrons and the occasional smaller corporate foundation.
Among these funders, a handful of prominent people of color stand out for their work establishing giving vehicles to support and convene artists, use the arts to soothe social ills and honor creatives who came before them.
Some donors are artists or dancers, while others made their fortunes in the business world. Some established a private or artist-endowed foundation, and others give through donor-advised funds. In other words, the arts-related giving from these individuals mirrors the nuance and diversity we typically see among megadonors of all races and their more plentiful legacy foundation peers. Moreover, they provide critical financial support for artists of color and arts organizations founded by or serving communities of color, all while navigating a sector that’s still plagued by persistent funding inequities.
I’ll dig into five of these individuals and their funding vehicles in a moment. But before I do, one quick caveat. This list does not include foundations established by people of color that support the arts as part of a multi-issue grantmaking portfolio or similarly constructed collaborative funds like the Southern Power Fund, First People’s Fund and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures – though those funders can also provide vital support for the arts.
With that as a preamble, here are five notable arts philanthropies founded by people of color.
A bulwark against public funding cuts: Misty Copeland Foundation
In 2015, ballet dancer Misty Copeland became the first African-American woman promoted to principal dancer in the American Ballet Theatre’s 75-year history. She’s also one of the many arts patrons who frame their philanthropy as a means to plug gaps in public education arts funding.
In 2022, Copeland established the Misty Copeland Foundation. Its flagship offering, BE BOLD, is an afterschool program designed for young children of color ages five to 12 that strives to make ballet accessible, affordable and fun, and remedy what it calls “the significant gap in quality afterschool programs and limited access to formal dance instruction frequently experienced by communities of color.”
The program’s partners include the National Dance Institute Collaborative for Teaching and Learning, and Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which hosted the program at six Bronx sites after the foundation launched. According to the foundation’s first and only available Form 990 thus far, it had $842,099 in total assets for the fiscal year ending December 2022. As of this Spring, BE BOLD was conducting programs at 14 community-based organization sites in the Bronx and Harlem.
“I wanted to create something that I haven’t seen before,” Copeland told Pointe Magazine’s Amy Brandt. “It wasn’t just about bringing ballet to after-school programs, it was about changing the structure of class, making it accessible to communities it wasn’t made for.”
Business world patron: Darryl Chappell Foundation
A big theme in IP’s white papers on arts funding is the number of prominent arts patrons hailing from outside of the arts world. As a self-described philanthropist who distributed “over $100,000 to support 50+ artists within five years (2019–2024) in the United States, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and South America.” Darryl Chappell, whose career includes roles at Freddy Mac, Bank of America and GE Capital, fits comfortably within this demographic.
In 2019, Chappell launched the Washington, D.C.-based Darryl Chappell Foundation “to empower Afrodescendant artists to achieve their highest potential.” The foundation supports artists through residencies and channels its namesake’s business experience by curating an online artists’ marketplace and offering free seminars on the business of art (think budgeting and tax preparation).
In another example of how the foundation embraces its role as a convener, it sponsors an Artist Talk Series, which it describes as a “platform for artists to share their career life experiences, highlight obstacles along their path, and to demonstrate how they were able to confront and overcome obstacles.”
Last June, the foundation hosted the seventh installment of the series in Pittsburgh, where participants discussed the “continued legacy of systemic racial and economic inequality with the particular focus on the intersection of race and the law” and “the necessity and critical potential of direct artistic engagement.” The talk was funded by a grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation.
Artist as activist: Art + Practice (Marc Bradford)
Mark Bradford is a Los Angeles-based artist known for his large and abstract mixed-media paintings. “No other contemporary artist,” wrote Washington Post national arts reporter Geoff Edgers, “has so effectively tackled the thorny and intertwined issues of race, sexuality and politics and used them to connect the chapters of America’s complicated history.”
In 2014, Bradford, collector Eileen Harris Norton and activist Allan DiCastro founded Art + Practice, a private operating foundation based in Leimert Park, a historically underinvested neighborhood in South Los Angeles where Bradford opened his first studio in the 1980s. Rather than ask disadvantaged kids to travel to museums elsewhere in the city, Bradford has made Leimert Park the destination. Art + Practice occupies a 20,000-square-foot campus that hosts art gatherings and fosters youth-related programs and activities. Admission to all art programming is free and open to the public.
In a 2022 conversation with cultural producer Clayton Campbell, Bradford said that when he told peers he was going to start a foundation, they’d say,“‘Oh, you're going to do art, or if you’re going to do work with at-risk people, you're going to do arts education.’ So it's always pushing more toward just kind of staying in your lane a little bit.” Bradford recognized the importance of arts education but also wanted to make sure the foundation reflected his belief that arts can be a springboard for catalyzing challenging conversations on urgent social issues. “The art world is a safe place for unsafe ideas,” he said.
Last November, Bradford won the J. Paul Getty Trust’s Getty Prize, which, as of last year, comes with the opportunity to award $500,000 to a nonprofit of the winner’s choosing. In April, Bradford announced he was awarding the grant to the Long Beach, California-based Arts for Healing and Justice Network, the state’s only arts collaborative for youth experiencing incarceration.
Donor-advised funder: Miranda Family Fund
Many arts patrons across the board do their grantmaking through donor-advised funds (DAFs). Unlike private foundations, these donors are not required to publicly report grantees on Form 990s or disburse 5% of noncharitable use assets annually — or ever, for that matter, though DAFs confer an immediate tax deduction.
This means that any analysis of arts philanthropy from people of color through private foundations undercounts the full breadth of support, since those giving through DAFs do not need to reveal where the money is flowing.
One such donor is “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who, along with his family, raises money and gives through the Miranda Family Fund. Launched in 2016, the fund “consists of a donor-advised fund that gives considerable amounts to nonprofits and personal contributions to political campaigns,” according to USA Today’s Sandra Guzmán.
As of 2022, the fund had given $103 million, including to the Miranda Family Fellowship, which supports “emerging artists and arts administrators from underrepresented communities to access education and long-term support that advance their careers within theatre and TV/film.” The fellowship cohort includes 130 individuals from seven different institutions, including Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company (Washington, D.C.), Vineyard Theatre (New York City) and Skidmore College.
“When we launched the fund, the thought was, ‘We don’t know how long this moment is going to last, but we want to do the best we can,’” Lin-Manuel’s father Luis told Guzmán. “We want to impact as many causes and people we can.”
The artist-endowed foundation: Anyone Can Fly Foundation (Faith Ringgold)
In 2019, I looked at the growing footprint of artist-endowed foundations, which the Aspen Institute defines as “a private foundation created or endowed by a visual artist, the artist’s surviving spouse, or other heirs or beneficiaries to own the artist’s assets for use in furthering charitable and educational activities serving a public benefit.”
These foundations act as stewards of the namesake’s artistic legacy and engage in charitable giving. A 2018 Aspen Institute white paper listed 127 artist-endowed foundations, including the Anyone Can Fly Foundation, based in Englewood, New Jersey.
Established in 2019 by Faith Ringgold (1930–2024), an American painter, author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist and intersectional activist, the foundation aims to “expand the art establishment's canon to include artists of the African Diaspora and to introduce the Great Masters of African American Art and their art traditions to children and adult audiences.”
The foundation’s programs include an annual art exhibition featuring works by master African American artists, a printmaking fellowship, and a Distinguished Artists & Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award honoring artists and scholars of the African diaspora who "have created a groundbreaking body of work that changed the course of art history."
Speaking to Ringgold in 2006, artist Nancy Egol Nikkal asked her why she started the foundation. “African-American artists suffer the same problems as all artists — they are not represented in the mainstream of American culture because art is not at the center of society,” Ringgold said. “Art is not a popular thing. Most people are not involved in the arts and do not know much about art or the works of artists. African-American artists are likely to get lost. The Anyone Can Fly Foundation aims to keep alive the reputations of the great African American artists so we continue to know who they are.”
For more IP analysis of donors of color — art patrons or otherwise — see here and here.
